When a virtual machine that is protected from threats stops
working, or the host server that it all runs on fails, Azure Site
Recovery Services allows users to maintain business continuity
until the virtual machine or host server on-premises is repaired
and made available. Azure Site Recovery Services, a feature in
Microsoft Azure, allows a replication of your virtual machines (VM)
to be done in real time and sends it to a backup vault in Azure. If
your server or site goes down due to faulty hardware or another
failure, you can fail-over with Azure Site Recovery so that the
virtual machine image stored in your backup vault will be
provisioned as a running VM in Microsoft Azure. Combined with an
Azure Virtual Network, client PCs that previously connected to the
server on-premises will connect to the server running in Azure.

Some of the new features integrated with Windows Server 2016
Essentials include:

Azure Virtual Network

As organizations transfer their workloads to cloud computing, they
seldom move all of their resources all at once. They instead move
some resources to the cloud and keep some on the premises. It's
much easier to move an organization to the cloud in stages over
time. Azure Virtual Network integration provides the network
infrastructure that makes that process seamless and manageable.
Azure Virtual networking is a service that enables organizations to
create a point-to-point (P2P) or site-to-site (S2S) virtual private
network that makes resources that are running in Azure (such as
virtual machines and storage) look as though they are on the local
network for seamless access to applications and resources.

Larger Deployments Support

Some medium-sized businesses need more functionality and capacity
to implement Windows Server Essentials. Windows Server 2016
Essentials provides increases the manageability of domains, users,
and devices by adding support for larger deployments with multiple
domains and domain controllers as well as ability to specify a
designated domain controller.